I, Sniper

“Even if you don’t buy it, and maybe I wouldn’t either if I’d seen all the people murdered with beer bottles and ball-peen hammers and twenty-five Brycos that you have, I hope you’ll indulge me a little, Washington. I can’t do this alone.”

“I wouldn’t do this for a guy without USMC tattooed on his arm, Gu

“Yeah.”

“Okay, how about into the house?”

“Well, if my theory is right, one of the basement windows has already been opened. That’s how they got in. Hell, the team may have even been in the house before Jack and Mitzi left; they got in at night. That would save them time and exposure. They work the house, that office particularly, while the bodies are outside. When the cops come, guess what our team is dressed as? Cops. In ten minutes the place is jammed with cops. They emerge from wherever, join the crowd, mill, then slip away. Who’s to know? Did you recognize everyone there on the crime scene?”

“A big murder draws more gawkers than a new Star Wars movie. You always see strangers there, at least in the begi

“Well, there you go.”

“All right, Gu

“Got it.”

“When do you think that will be?”

“About three a.m.”

“Three a.m?”

“Three a.m. Wednesday.”

“Three a.m. Wednesday! This is Monday!”

“I need to go through the house carefully. I need to get a read on their life. I have to find out who they were, what they were into, what they were pla

“Just don’t get caught.”

Bob slapped the backpack he carried.

“Infrared gear. I can see in the dark. No lights will show on the outside. If anyone comes into the house, I’ll go to ground. Nobody’ll see me. I can be real still. The sniper thing again. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

It was a different America. He hadn’t seen this America. He’d been in the America of the United States Marine Corps, in mud and jungle and slatternly, jerry-built outposts and tempos, under monsoon weather or baking heat, and only glimpsed this America on the TV in the squad room, if there was a squad room. But everywhere in this house the late sixties and early seventies still lived, like some sort of Camelot, some sort of holy time when we were young and green and firm and the world was filled with possibility. Mr. and Mrs. Strong were narcissists for sure, in that they had dozens of photographs of themselves and their actions on the walls, as well as souvenir front pages-pentagon bombed, thousands disrupt downtown, campus admin building occupied, cops use teargas on demos, two killed in bank robbery, and finally wanted couple freed-as well as political campaign buttons, flyers, gas masks, anything that spoke of the realities, and maybe the fun, of the Movement.

A whole section was devoted to their day of freedom; Bob ran his infrared over the framed newspaper front pages, with its famous picture of Jack and Mitzi in midleap, full of the joy of freedom, as the famous radical lawyer Milton Tigerma

History turned on the next wall to great men, big men, giant men. These were the portraits Bob didn’t recognize, but they were helpfully identified as if in a hall of fame, people with names like Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che and Fidel of course, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Gavrilo Princip, and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and some other big commie boys. Ho was there, and so were Chou and Mao, and someone called La Pasionaria.

The infrared gave the history a special green hue, as brought to life in the AN/PVS-7 goggles. He was a frogman swimming the bottom of the murky bay of radical America, 1969 to 1975.

Bill and Mitzi were everywhere in those days. Beautiful radical children, with wild piles and tendrils of hair and eyes wide as pie plates, elves, stars, charismatics, leprechauns of mischief. A hundred shots showed them with megaphone or loudspeaker, leading or addressing the masses. They were always sexy, in raffish war surplus cast-offs, with Indian bands about their heads, gaudy scarves, tight jeans that showed off their lea

He checked for signs of search and came up with ambiguous possibilities. Yes, the cabinet locks in Jack’s office appeared uniformly scarred. But that could have been Jack’s own clumsiness with keys as easily as a professional burglar’s pick. There had indeed been an open window that allowed him to squeeze into the basement, and that lock too bore signs of picking-or of a careless window washer banging it with a squeegee.

He himself picked each cabinet, and inside, besides Jack’s secret stash of porno (he was a Penthouse guy), a pound of very nice hash, some prescription meds, there seemed to be nothing suspicious, certainly no obvious sign of something having been removed. But what would that be? A blank space on a shelf? An opening in a row of books? There wasn’t much.

He went over the office top to bottom, opening each cabinet, rifling through each book, looking in each drawer, searching for computer code words (and finding none). He’d wait to turn the machine on in the light, so that its glow wouldn’t radiate through the windows into the night. He thumped the walls for evidence of a safe hiding behind the bookshelves, but no safe seemed to present itself.

Nothing, nothing at least on a first pass.

He tried all the obvious hiding places, feeling under the drawers for tape strands that might indicate something had been secretly affixed in an out-of-the-way site, opening the battery casings of all the portable tape recorders, the cameras, the iPods that lay around, finally, laboriously-it took hours-opening each CD jacket, ru